The Old Wine Shades Read online

  ‘Oh, the chef! Yes, of course, he’s the chef.’ Melrose took a long swallow of his whiskey, commenting on how smooth it was.

  Where did that damned poodle fit in? She’d asked him how he liked the Labrador, so she was certain to ask about the poodle.

  ‘Evening, gentlemen,’ came a voice from behind Melrose.

  ‘Superintendent!’ said Major Champs and Colonel Neame in unison.

  Jury made a slight bow and greeted Melrose Plant. ‘Back in the enfolding arms of Boring’s.’

  ‘Delighted to see you, Mr. Jury, or’–Colonel Neame continued, sotto voce–’is there trouble afoot?’ From his expression, one could tell he was hopeful.

  ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  Major Champs said, ‘I hope a body doesn’t turn up every time you do, Superintendent!’

  ‘So do I.’

  They laughed at this and slapped their chair arms.

  Melrose had beckoned to one of the porters as soon as Jury appeared. Sit down, he said to Jury, making room on the leather sofa the unfortunate color of dried blood.

  Jury removed his coat and sat as the porter (slightly stooped, but not as old as Young Higgins) came up to their group. Melrose said, ‘Whiskey all round.’

  Colonel Neame reminisced: ‘That death here was quite the most exciting and unnerving time I’ve had since the war. A real shocker, that was. To think the killer just walked in, stabbed poor Pitt and walked out again and no one the wiser.’

  Said Major Champs, ‘Just goes to show how dead we all must look in Boring’s.’

  Jury laughed. ‘No, I really don’t think so; what it shows is how shockingly easy it is for someone to commit a murder in a public place. Like this.’

  The waiter reappeared and set down their drinks.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Melrose. They all raised their glasses.

  ‘So you’re not here on police business?’

  ‘No, just to have lunch.’

  Major Champs harrumphed. ‘Well, I’m surprised someone hasn’t killed the cook.’

  Melrose laughed. ‘That bad?’

  ‘Lamb was tough. Still, food’s usually decent enough. I expect even the cook can have a bad day now and then.’

  ‘But not as bad, let’s hope,’ Melrose held up the book, ‘as Miss Praed’s chef.’

  12

  Young Higgins informed them that as there’d been a run on the lamb during this luncheon, he hoped the cold beef tongue would suffice. Or the stuffed portobello mushroom?’

  Melrose raised an inquiring eye. ‘A run? But there’s no one else here, Higgins.’ Melrose spread his arms in testimony to empty space.

  ‘Don’t be so dramatic,’ said Jury. ‘The mushrooms are fine with me, Higgins.’

  ‘Mushroom,’ said Melrose. ‘There’s only one.’

  ‘What are they stuffed with, Higgins?’

  ‘What is it stuffed with? Good grief,’ Melrose said. ‘Wiggins would know more about portobello mushrooms than you.’

  ‘If it was stuffed with a ground physic, maybe,’ said Jury.

  ‘With what?’

  ‘A ground-lamb mixture, m’ lord,’ said Young Higgins to Melrose.

  Melrose said, ‘Don’t tell me, I’m not having them.’

  ‘It,’ said Jury.

  Melrose gritted his teeth.

  ‘I guess now we know what happened to the lamb!’ said Jury with a manufactured gleeful smile.

  Young Higgins joined in the revelry with a wrinkled smile of his own. ‘Yes, sir, and we also have a tomato-mozzarella salad.’ Jury spread his huge white napkin across his lap. ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘Indeed, sir.’ Higgins bowed. ‘And you’ll be having the cold tongue, m’ lord?’

  Melrose shivered. ‘No, I guess I’ll have the portobello mushroom. We’ll both have it.’

  ‘Them,’ said Jury.

  Melrose glared.

  ‘And we’ll have the salad also?’ said Young Higgins.

  Melrose was tempted to say they would but was Young Higgins joining them? Higgins seemed to have adopted this Irish idiom of asking a question that wasn’t a question and, in the bargain, including himself in. Instead, Melrose said to Jury, ‘We will, won’t we?’ Jury nodded. ‘We will, yes.’

  The elderly waiter shuffled away.

  ‘Young Higgins isn’t getting any younger.’ Jury sighed as if this marked a stage in his own increase of years.

  ‘He’s not getting any older, either. He was probably an eighty year-old teenager.’ Melrose opened the carte du vin. ‘The wine, the wine, the wine... Now what goes with portabello mushrooms?’ He ran his eye down the list. ‘How about a nice little Merlot?’

  ‘How about a nice big Merlot? Or maybe a Montrachet ‘66. All of the other ‘66s are over the hill. Undrinkable. But what I’d really like is a Bordeaux, say a Chateau Petrus? It’s pretty pricey, but you can afford it.’

  Melrose shut his eyes. ‘Now, we’ve become a wine enthusiast?’

  ‘I don’t know about you, but I have. The bottle shouldn’t be much over a couple hundred pounds.’

  ‘Really? Well, let’s have a case if that’s all!’

  ‘Okay.’

  Melrose sought out one of the waiters, his eyes connecting with those of the (really) young ginger-haired one who came over snappily. Melrose gave him the wine order–the nice little Merlot–and the waiter sailed off.

  This done, Melrose rested the wine list against the marble column by which the table sat. The columns were fixed at strategic places around the room, which was a handsome one, with its dark wood and vaulted ceiling and snow-white tablecloths. ‘Okay,’ he said again. ‘You have a story to tell me, you said.’

  Jury thought for a moment, but not about Harry Johnson.

  ‘Maybe that’s what we live for, why we go on.’

  Melrose gave him a look. ‘You never got over the Henry James contest, did you? ‘Why we go on,’ indeed. Are you saying we live for stories?’

  ‘Children do, don’t they? Isn’t that their favorite thing?’

  ‘After beating each other up and tying firecrackers to their dogs’ tails, yes, I imagine they like to relax over a good story. I expect you’re making a point, but I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do, either. The Henry James competition, remember: ‘Man walked into a pub,’ et cetera,’ Jury said.

  ‘Ah. The master himself would put it perhaps as ‘After a grave exchange with his interlocutor, Lord Joyner made his way to his dear old Pot and Pickle,’ blah blah blah.’

  ‘Off the top of your head, damned good James.’

  ‘It’s not easy being Henry James.’

  ‘No. Well, that’s the point about this story. It begins in just that way. A man walked into a pub and told me this story.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I said to him. Told him he was winding me up. Anyway, the pub’s in the City. It’s called the Old Wine Shades.

  I was there, sitting at the bar, glooming away, nothing special–’

  ‘Special what?’

  ‘For a gloom.’

  ‘Ah. Go on.’

  ‘A man walked in, clearly well off, clothes like yours–’

  ‘This rag of a jacket?’ Melrose pulled the collar down for a better look.

  ‘–and sat down beside me. Somehow that sounds ominous.’

  ‘Yes, like Little Miss Muffet. Go on.’

  ‘He told me this story.’ Here Jury related the story to Melrose in great detail. Gödel. Niels Bohr. Wave function. It took him through the salad, the portobello mushroom, the pudding and now through brandy and coffee. ‘His name is Harry Johnson, did I mention that?’

  ‘Yes. That’s the strangest story I’ve ever heard,’ said Melrose, as he returned to the lighting of a cigar. ‘Not only because of the initial situation, but because it’s a story within a story within a story.’

  Jury frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s four stories. Didn’t you not
ice?’ Melrose shoved his cup and glass aside and leaned toward Jury. ‘One’–he folded down his index finger–’is Johnson himself; he’s the frame of the story.

  Two’–the second finger bent inward–’is the story of the disappearance of the Gault woman’–third finger ticked this off–’three is Ben Torres’s story, and four’–fourth finger down–’is the story his mother told him.’

  Jury reflected. ‘I guess you’re right.’

  ‘And in a way, it gets further and further from the first story. It’s like those little Russian nesting dolls. Matryoshkas?’

  ‘If it is, what’s your point?’

  ‘Well, that would certainly make me wonder if he’s telling the truth.’

  Jury smiled. ‘You know that would somehow be the most outrageous thing of all. Is he? I asked him that during the first dinner and he asked why would he lie. To what end? Sergeant Wiggins thinks he followed me into the pub, that he knew who I was and told me the story.’

  ‘You’re still left with ‘why?’ You believe him?’

  ‘Not altogether. It becomes harder and harder the more he tells and yet easier and easier with his telling it.’

  ‘You mean we’ve not come to the end?’

  ‘No, apparently not. He said that first night that there was no end. By that I expect he means no solution.’

  ‘Does he think perhaps you might be able to solve it?’ Jury shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Say he does know who you are. Sergeant Wiggins may well be right.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Just say he does know you. What if this is not something that happened, but something that’s going to happen.’

  Jury looked disbelieving at first and then amused. ‘How could it be–’

  ‘Richard. You can listen to all this codswallop night after night, yet you can’t entertain this theory? Admittedly odd, but then so’s the whole story.’ Melrose rolled his cigar around in his mouth. ‘An event in the future.’

  ‘When did you take up cigars?’

  ‘This afternoon. I knew it would annoy you to death.’

  ‘Thanks. Well, this theory of yours, can you take it out for a walk? Explain it?’

  ‘No. Let me think .... If this is to happen in the future, it must be that Mr. Johnson is protecting himself or someone else. But how would it do that?’ Melrose rubbed the back of his neck. ‘What if this Hugh–’

  ‘Gauh.’

  ‘–if Hugh Gault was trying to acquire this property for some reason–no, no, no. That’s not what I mean ....

  A hypothetical: you investigate, you solve this mystery–’

  ‘Not officially. I’m on leave, remember? CS Racer thinks I need a rest. What he really thinks is I need another job.’

  Melrose made a face and was silent.

  Jury broke the silence. ‘You’re theorizing that Wiggins is right, that Harry knew who I was, that he deliberately sought me out?’

  ‘I expect that’s what I’m saying, yes. I don’t think it would suit his purpose to tell this story to just anybody. Hasn’t your picture been in the paper, showing you as an example of police brutality?’ Melrose grinned.

  ‘Don’t exaggerate.’ Jury sat back. ‘That is a point I hadn’t considered- He might have recognized me, true.’ Jury frowned.

  ‘And there’s this shadow over your police record. You’ve ‘shaken the very foundations of police work.’ That’s a quote from one of the rags.’

  ‘So I would be particularly vulnerable.’

  ‘Like that, yes.’

  ‘I have to admit I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘It’s still murky, of course. Say he wants to engage you, wants you as a witness. What I can’t get my mind around is that Harry Johnson walked into–what’s the pub?’

  ‘The Old Wine Shades.’

  ‘Walked in with this dog Bingo–’

  ‘Mungo.’

  Melrose nodded. ‘Walked in with Mungo and without knowing you, started in on this elaborate tale. What brought it up? What were you talking about?’

  ‘Dreams. The belief of many researchers in the field that dreams have no real meaning. I said how do these dream experts get around the idea that there’s always a narrative. A dream is a story. The scientific take on this is that the dreamer supplies the narrative. Well, I was talking I guess about narratives, about stories, and how all of us seem to want a story.’

  ‘Which is what you meant before.’

  ‘Yes. In any event, Harry said if I wanted a story he could tell me a story. And that was it. The Gault woman and her son vanished, along with the dog. The dog came back.’ Jury smiled.

  ‘‘The dog came back.’ Crazy. The dog was brought back, don’t you imagine?’

  ‘Yes, probably. But I like to think of Mungo’s making this arduous journey back to London.’

  ‘Sentimentalist. But if the story is really a lot of codswallop, then why drag the dog into it? That the dog was with them and managed to get back from wherever they were is pretty fantastic.’

  ‘The whole damned thing’s fantastic.’

  ‘Maybe your first instinct was right and he’s just winding you up. But why?’

  Jury shrugged. ‘Because he could?’

  Melrose gave a short burst of laughter. ‘Yes, there’s always that.

  Because he could.’’

  13

  It would hardly be called lively, but there were a few more customers in the Old Wine Shades the following night. Jury supposed lunchtime was when the pub did most of its business. The City was not a residential area, but a region of office blocks, financial institutions, the Corn Exchange, Leadenhall Market, Monument and St. Paul’s. Although there were a few private residences, the heart of the City beat in time to the making of money.

  Jury posted himself in the same chair at the bar and ordered a glass of Beaujolais (paying no attention to year or provenance, whieh earned him no points with Trevor). He hoped that long talk the night before with Plant hadn’t tainted his ability to listen to the rest of the story–the third installment–without prejudice.

  Did Harry Johnson know who Jury was? Had he read about the CID cock-up in the papers? It was interesting to speculate. And while Jury was speculating, Harry walked in with Mungo on the lead. Mungo was a dog who seemed to like routine; he sat looking up at Jury until Jury reached down and rubbed his head. Then the dog settled under his chair.

  ‘I’m beginning to feel,’ said Harry Johnson, as he tapped a cigarette on his silver ease, ‘a sense of déja vu–a kind of traneelike state. Are you?’

  Jury smiled. ‘How many people have you told this story to?’

  ‘No one.’ Harry’s lighter clicked open, spurted flame, shut. He examined Jury-

  (Or so it felt to Jury.)

  –through a brief scrim of smoke rising upward from his cigarette. ‘You’re wondering why I’m telling you this, right?’

  ‘I am, yes, seeing that I’m a perfect stranger.’

  ‘I suppose I wanted to tell someone who didn’t know the people involved. You’d get a clearer picture, maybe.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’d think that.’

  Harry Johnson smiled

  ‘You still think I’m winding you up?’ He ordered a glass of Pinot Gris Grand Cru (‘89, if you have it, Trev’) and Trevor went off, smiling.

  ‘Not that, necessarily, but whether you have some ulterior motive.’ That sounded like worn-out dialogue in a bad film.

  ‘It’d be easy enough to check up on what I’ve told you. Call the agent; better yet, go to Lark Rise and see the agent and go to this Winterhaus and have a look round.’

  ‘But Gauh’s agent knows nothing of the history of the house.’

  ‘She knows Ben Torres.’

  ‘She knew only that he wanted to rent it, didn’t she? At least that’s what I gather from what you’ve told me.’

  Trevor set Harry’s glass before him, poured a small amount of Pinot Gris into it. Harry thanked him and lift
ed the glass, sniffed it and rolled it around, making little waves. He sipped it. ‘Good. Excellent.’

  Trevor filled the glass, asked Jury if he cared for another drink, and, when Jury nodded, picked up the bottle of Beaujolais, which he clearly regarded as plonk, and poured some more, then walked away.

  Harry didn’t answer Jury’s question about what the agent knew, but said, instead, ‘Shall I tell you the rest, though? I mean, do you want to hear it?’

  Jury smiled. ‘Absolutely.’

  Harry drank the wine. ‘Then Hugh went to the house.’

  ‘To Winterhaus?

  ‘Yes. And the wood. The police had looked round, but after all it wasn’t a crime scene, so they weren’t about to spend time and manpower when as far as they knew, Glynnis Gault hadn’t even been there.’

  Jury nodded. ‘Tm rather surprised they bothered looking in the first place.’

  ‘Well, perhaps there was not too much going on in Lark Rise, so they wanted to be helpful. I expect they saw how distraught Hugh was. The whole thing was crazy and it’s possible they were intrigued, too.’ Harry stopped talking and drank his wine. ‘Um-um. This is good.’

  Jury waited.

  Harry said, ‘Did it ever occur to you that what is unseen and unheard is more frightening than what we do see?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Imagination can toss up things far worse than a John Carpenter film. It’s the not knowing.’

  ‘Whatever is there, you get only the sense of. Hugh said he most definitely got the sense of something very scary.’

  ‘In the house?’

  ‘In the wood.’

  Mungo came out from under Jury’s chair and gazed up at him.

  ‘What’s up, boy?’ Jury scratched his head. Mungo went back under the chair.

  Jury went on: ‘But your friend Hugh was not in a state of mind where he would find otherwise. I doubt he would find the place benign, given what he thought.’

  ‘You think he was imagining things?’

  ‘Of course. That’s what we were just talking about.’

  ‘No, in this case, you’re saying there was no basis for the imagining.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go with him? Hugh, I mean?’

  ‘Hugh didn’t want me to. He wanted to be by himself. I didn’t press him on that point. Anyway, the wood, he said, was very cold.